Blog & Stuff

Hack For Change Challenge

Posted: 2013-06-03 06:19:00

Participated in the Hack For Change challenge in Western Mass.
All the challenges where inspiring, I took part in the "Unlocking Prison Phone Data" because it seemed like the most difficult challenge.
A blog post about it is here
Overall it was a lot of scrapping and command line work done by Gyepi Sam, doing some amazing work in Perl and all command line. It was great to see. Pulling down files, processing the PDFs via OCR and pushing them into the Postgres db.
Jonathan Hills, took on the work of scrapping the pages that lead to the files using Python.
I teamed up with Jake Mitchell and Aaron Smith to manage setting up Rails and getting the Models ready to take the data.
I later setup SunspotSolr to speed up the results of the search.
I will post a link to the site after the 26th once there is a bit more to show.
Their website
http://hackforwesternmass.org/